An oil-painting provocateur, Mark Seabrook’s work injects fun, silliness, and sometimes a bit of pathos into images of history, film, and daily life. In one, a cowboy is riding a rocking horse through the great plains, in another Daffy Duck has been caught among the reeds by a 1940s hunter in galoshes and heavy-knit fleece.
Seabrook’s works tend to be about charming contrasts, the serious with the silly. I was intrigued about this dichotomy, and reached out to Mark for a chat.
One of your soy sauce fish paintings enjoys the fifth spot on the Best of All Time list on Reddit’s r/Art, a subreddit with 22.3 million followers. It’s safe to say that’s your most popular collection, but do you have a personal favourite, maybe one that you feel is underrated?
I was surprised to read that, as I wasn’t aware of it making that list. It’s kind of crazy, isn’t it? That painting got something like 42,000 upvotes, even though those little plastic soy fish aren’t available in the USA. Many of the comments on that post were asking what the object was. I’m not sure that its popularity was not mostly due to Reddit’s algorithm. I still get asked about a painting (and subsequent print) of Bubble O’Bill riding a horse in Monument Valley, and that Reddit post only got five upvotes.
That series, The Catch, has definitely been my most successful. I painted the first one in 2018. It has really seemed to tap into a certain nostalgia. When it was announced that South Australia was going to ban the sale of the plastic fish, I received many messages of consolation!
For me it’s your Bill Burroughs portrait, that’s pointillism isn’t it? Was that a style you experimented with before settling on your current style? What else did you play with?
Thank you. I’m very pleased with the end result of that piece. It is pointillism, yes. It’s just thousands of ink dots but the end result has a surprising amount of depth to it. Much like newspaper print, from a distance it can look like a photograph. It’s very time consuming and there’s not a lot of room for error but it’s worth the effort. I still do these drawings on occasion.
Burroughs has such an interesting face, especially in his later years. I’ve painted him a few times and have another one on the go that I need to get back to at some stage. I did this one because I really wanted his face on a t-shirt. It works really well!
Bill Burroughs is the king of experimenting with form. Do you enjoy working in many other art forms outside of painting?
I don’t do a huge amount. There’s the ink and graphite drawings, sometimes watercolour, once I did a soy fish painting using soy sauce!, but oil painting is my main focus. There’s always so much more to learn and there’s always areas where you can improve. I’m fascinated by the various printing techniques; linocut, woodblock, engraving, etching, mezzotint, lithograph, and so on. I’ve never done any of them but they all seem so intriguing. One day!
What’s been inspiring you lately? It sounds like you read a bit.
I do read a lot, but not as much as I used to. I’m on a bit of a Cormac McCarthy kick at the moment. Old western films are obviously a big inspiration. I’ve lost count of how many paintings I’ve set in Monument Valley! I enjoy seeing other people’s paintings at galleries and trying to work out how they achieved certain things. I can guarantee you that at any exhibition opening there will be a small group of painters who will be geeking out over technique!
Do you have any fun concepts cooking that you can tease?
I tend to work on many pieces at the same time. Oil paint takes a long time to dry before you can do the next layer. Some painters will work on one piece at a time until it is finished, but I’ve never been able to do that. I like to jump around a lot. So there’s a number of different things I’m exploring. I’m still enamoured with the look of the monochrome paintings of hunting and fishing scenes based on old photographs, so there will be more of those. I like the juxtaposition of different objects in the same scene, and am working on a series with elements of 8-bit computer game imagery.
A number of years ago, I did a few paintings featuring Space Invaders and there’s a lot more to explore there. The 1928 Mickey Mouse cartoon entered the public domain last year, so that will probably pop up at some stage.
And if I can ask you a little about the business side of things, I read that one of the best responses you’ve had to your work was hearing that someone hung your print in their bedroom and it makes them smile everyday. How much of your art income comes from secondary sales like prints and things like that?
I think about that comment a lot actually. It’s nice to be able to have a positive impact on someone’s life, no matter how minor.
Nearly all the prints I have done have been in collaboration with Outré Gallery. Prints are labour intensive, from taking sharp photos of the paintings, to the printing and the packaging and shipping. Outré have that down pat. I should investigate it further. I have friends who manage to make it work very well, but I always think that I would rather be painting than queueing at the post office.
That said, it is very difficult to make a living in the creative arts. I’m fortunate to have a day job that is very flexible.
I always think it’s interesting hearing the different ways that artists monetise their work. I know that some sell extra things like keychains or hold art classes. Have you had any luck with some of those more unique methods?
No, aside from the occasional print, I don’t do anything like that. The artists that seem to be able to do that most successfully tend to have character based artwork, and can translate those characters into the 3D world incredibly well. I seem to have done the reverse, and have taken existing 3D objects, plastic soy sauce fish, Lego Fabuland, My Little Pony etc, and put them into a 2D space. So, no, that wouldn’t work for me. Ha ha.
Teaching art is a very specific skill. I haven’t had any art training and I’m sure there’s a lot of things that I do ‘wrong’ so I wouldn’t want to project that onto other people! I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time. If you are looking to take an art class, I highly recommend one run by someone who knows exactly what they are doing and has the skill to convey it.
If you had an unlimited budget, how would your work change?
Interesting question! I’m not sure it would change very much fundamentally. It would most likely get bigger. I’ve been focussing on smaller works in the last few years. I do enjoy working at a smaller scale, but it’s also because it hasn’t been the best economic environment for large work lately. I guess I would be more likely to experiment with other mediums. I studied medieval gilding techniques for my Art History thesis and it would be cool to incorporate that in some way. Maybe I would finally get around to exploring printing techniques!
Thanks so much for sharing your time with me, do you have any works or upcoming shows that you’d like to promote?
The end of the year and the start of the new one always seems to be busy with group shows. Outré Gallery and Beinart Gallery both have group shows in the new year that focus on local Australian artists. I’m very lucky to be involved with both of those. Two galleries in Portland, Oregon, Nucleus and Brassworks, have postcard shows opening next month and I have pieces in both.
I also have pieces in group shows this year with Superwow on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, and online gallery Wow x Wow. Otherwise, I’m chipping away at my next solo show at Beinart Gallery in 2027. They’re an excellent gallery and I’m very humbled to have the opportunity to show with them again.
More of Mark’s work can be found on his website or on his socials: Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.
